Up to No Good
by Maenad1
Summary: The trouble with uneasy consciences.


James knew it was all his fault.

Well-- not directly. He hadn't known anything about it, and he would've prevented it if he'd had any idea. But if he'd remembered to do his Charms homework before Quidditch practice that night the month before last, when it all started, he wouldn't've had to sprint straight back up to the dormitory to find it, and if he hadn't been hurrying he could have taken a short detour to meet Remus coming out of the hospital wing. And if he'd been walking with Remus, his friend wouldn't have encountered Snape alone.

Ordinarily, Moony could handle Snape. In fact, he managed him better than any of them; James and Sirius were too likely to lose their tempers and use their wands, and Peter froze in confrontations and could only give his friends a spirited account later of what he _would_ have said to that greasy scalped git if his jaws hadn't locked together. However, it was a pleasure to watch Remus work. Sometimes they did just that, the three of them, and stood in the background as an audience while their friend reduced Severus Snape to a glowering puddle of oil.

The trick, he'd always maintained, was not to get angry, just to ride it out and let Snape conjure a noose and hang himself with it. "Is that so, Severus?" he'd begin, reasonable as you please, and hear out the whole harangue of accusations and insults, before finishing the Slytherin brat off when he paused for breath with some remark spun off his last comment that he didn't realise was an insult until his opponent was around the corner, surrounded by his snickering friends, leaving Snape gaping in the hallway.

Beautiful.

Remus straight from the hospital wing, with his nerves still as raw as fresh rope burn and his neck all out of joint was, alas, a different matter entirely.

Especially this time. They'd had a close call, the evening before, down at Hogsmeade. Some idiot people had been out strolling the streets at obscene hours of the night, and the wolf had smelled them before his companions could steer him away. Sometimes, when they were playing in the forest or the village under the moonlight, one of them would catch a look in its eyes, or a movement of its head, that gave him the distinct impression a human mind was looking out of those bestial eyes, and if they asked him later, Remus would say he recalled this or that, Peter scurrying between his paws, or James and Sirius chasing each other's tails; but the smell of man gave the wolf the upper hand, and it had been off after its quarry before the other three were even aware it was there.

And the wolf couldn't be persuaded, once it had supremacy; it was brute force or nothing. When it was all over, Remus had had great bruises on his sides where James had beaten him back with hooves and antlers, and terrible tears at the neck where Sirius had sunk his teeth in to restrain him; it was a miracle he hadn't crushed his throat. Come morning, they'd had to support him between them to get him back to the Shrieking Shack, Peter, too small to assist in the skirmish and thus unscathed, holding him up on one side, James and Sirius, limping and dazed, alternating on the other.

Thankfully, nobody had been bitten, and Madam Pomfrey's policy was not to ask too many questions.

But, shaken as Remus had been by what had nearly happened, Snape's snide remarks had struck home, and the werewolf, failed by wit and common sense, hadn't even thought of his wand, but lashed out with his fists. It was some consolation, James supposed, that Snape's nose had been broken in the tussle, but the infraction had earned Moony a detention and one of those conversations with Dumbledore that left you feeling as though you'd let down the most important man in the world, and fuming and humiliated, he'd related the whole incident to the first of his friends he'd found, with all the embellishments of the first flush of temper.

After all, you couldn't ask for a better confidant than Sirius. If he was your friend, he'd take your part no matter what the circumstances were, a scruffy whirlwind of indignation who was a salve to wounded pride, and so extravagantly furious as to rebalance your own perspective on what had happened.

By the time James and Peter heard the revised version of events, Remus had moderated it so that the blame was firmly placed on his own distemper and Snape's admittedly abysmal timing, and most of the complaints had been in reference to the amount of time it was going to take him to dust _every_ picture on the third floor, especially since the people depicted in them _would_ wander off so that it was impossible to keep track of which ones you'd already done, which hadn't stopped his friends from directing a few pointed comments on personal hygiene and intelligence at Snape's absent person.

Of course, retaliation was required. There was enmity there too deep to be denied. Snape detested all of them; undoubtedly James most of all, but he would hardly be displeased by the chance to rid himself of Sirius, Remus or Peter. Besides, you just didn't let a Slytherin get away with getting one of your own in trouble. Unspeakable torments at the-- perhaps literally-- unseen hands of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot and Prongs lay in Severus Snape's future, whatever the crystal balls said.

But revenge was an art, and Sirius Black was a terrible artist. Real vengeance required a degree of preparation, to ensure that a) you didn't get caught, b) that your prey wasn't so seriously damaged in body or spirit as to put you in the wrong, and most importantly of all c) that the victim knew precisely who had set him up and why, but was prevented by pride from ever revealing it to anyone.

All Sirius ever thought of was to strike the blow and claim the point and hang the consequences. He must have sought Snape out that very evening, picked a fight with him and in the midst of some elaborate taunt revealed how to immobilise the Whomping Willow and thus discover where Remus Lupin disappeared to every month and earn himself his own pair of werewolf fangs, if not a painful and ignominious demise.

By the next full moon he'd forgotten all about it. A few days later there had been an unfortunate incident involving Snape and a Shrinking Solution that had lifted everybody's spirits-- occasionally it was advantageous that Gryffindor always got lumped with Slytherin for Potions-- and nobody had thought any more about tormenting good old Severus. At least, not significantly more than usual.

It wasn't until they were heading down the tunnel to meet Remus that Sirius recalled what he'd done and thought to impart the information to his companions. Even then they hadn't taken the situation seriously; the likelihood of Snape believing anything he had heard from Sirius was so small as to be inconsequential. So, light hearted and more amused than exasperated at Padfoot's rashness, they had continued blithely down the passage, transformed and got past the tree and, having once again secured the good will of the werewolf, were about to head outside when they caught the scent of a human in the tunnel through which they had just come.

A draught must have carried it down the tunnel, because the origin of the smell was nowhere in sight. One moment they were cavorting with a relatively placid werewolf, the next four heads went up, three in alarm, one in sudden menace. Then Peter was squealing an unnecessary warning, and, there being neither time nor vocal cords for recriminations, Sirius and James were moving in concert, the former to grapple with the frantic wolf, which was determined not to be thwarted in the pursuit of its natural prey twice in two months, the latter to dart back down the tunnel to warn the trespasser of his immanent peril.

Worst of all, once he was out of the Shack proper, James couldn't be a stag. He had needed a human voice to shout "_Run!_" and hands to push the resisting intruder-- Snape, of course-- back down the tunnel. At least until Snape caught a glimpse of the frothing, enraged _thing_ that was being held back by some unseen force, Sirius being hidden by the sheer bulk of the werewolf, at the entry to the tunnel over the shoulder of the hated boy who was hustling him away. After that, they had raced away together; James, whose legs gave him a longer stride, shoving Snape from behind to make him go faster. He'd pushed him back through the tree and was clambering through himself when the willow came to life again, thrashing as if to avenge every piece of flora that had ever been plucked by human hands. With difficulty he'd extricated himself from the root system, though not without breaking his glasses and earning himself several scratches from flailing branches and slivers of glass and was stumbling, half blind after Snape's dwindling form when something struck him from behind.

His first thought had been "_Remus_," but the blow was a stinging whiplash that had sent him reeling, not the relentless weight of paws and muzzle, and as he staggered, disoriented, it had hit him again, and again, blurry green fists pummelling him from all sides. The last thing he recalled was a heavy blow to his head that had caused sparks of red and green and blue to flare up behind his eyes, like the side-effects of a malfunctioning wand; then nothing.

Later, they told him how Peter, feeling useless watching Sirius fight with the werewolf, had meandered back up the tunnel to see how James had fared, and, after touching the knot on the tree and wriggling to the other side, seen his prostrate, insensible friend and immediately transformed and pulled him out of range of the tree's blows.

Afraid to leave him to get help, afraid to stay lest Snape, who was by now nowhere in sight, was even now bringing a cohort of irate teachers down the passage to expel them all, he had gone back down to the shack and communicated through the series of signals they had developed to Sirius-- who was more than a little distracted by the werewolf who was attempting to claw him to death-- that James was lying injured beyond the Whomping Willow.

The werewolf, irritable at having lost the scent, had taken out much of its temper on its packmate, and it was thus some time before Sirius was free to assist, but eventually it had given up on the game, or the fight, whatever it was classified as in its demented mind, and curled up in an exhausted, sullen heap at the foot of the stairs, allowing Padfoot and Wormtail the leisure to hobble back to the safe barrier of the tree and collect the injured Prongs.

They'd carried him up to the hospital wing, Sirius still too stunned for guilt, Peter too glad that someone else was present to make the decisions to assign blame, and awaited Remus' inevitable arrival.

Thankfully, James had come to first, though his head had throbbed too much for prolonged coherent thought, and they'd managed to concoct a reasonably plausible story between them that Remus only had to agree to when he finally appeared, incensed and anxious and confused all at once, before anybody arrived to ask questions.

Of course, they'd had to admit that they'd known Remus was a werewolf. And Sirius had told Snape about the willow as a sort of joke, never thinking he'd actually _try_ it. James had heard about it, somehow-- they weren't clear on that bit-- and gone after him. Both his injuries and Remus' had been sustained tangling with the willow, albeit on different sides, and Peter and Sirius had, truthfully enough, suffered minor wounds in rescuing their friend from the grasp of the tree.

Then Madam Pomfrey had bustled in and broken up the conclave by dosing James back into oblivion with sleeping potions, and by the time he had regained consciousness Peter and Sirius had been released and Remus was wearing the mulish expression of a healthy patient too long confined to a bed; he'd thanked James briefly, then refused to refer to the events of the previous night again, rather enlisting his friend's inexhaustible store of innate charm to liberate them both from the hospital wing.

James had immediately sought out Sirius, who was not all that difficult to find, not being the unobtrusive type, and berated him for his stupidity with as much vehemence as a teacher who hadn't seen a scrap of homework in the entire school year. For the first five minutes Sirius had defended himself with a sort of forced exuberance, then he had sunk down into a chair with his face in his hands, because he wasn't _stupid_, and he did think, if only after the event. This, if anything, had only fuelled James' temper, and he'd kept it up for a good half hour, while Sirius' head drooped lower and lower, like a dejected dog facing his master's wrath, until he heard himself refer to him as 'Padfoot' mid tirade, at which point he supposed he had forgiven him.

Whether Remus would was another matter entirely. If one went through his possessions-- and given that their belongings tended to gravitate toward one another's and form one jumbled pile in the centre of the room, it was difficult not to-- one discovered amidst the fraying robes, textbooks and broken quills, several weighty tomes on magical law that fell open at oft perused sections pertaining to werewolves, so even if one couldn't stay awake in History of Magic, one was quite well aware of what happened to werewolves who breached the Code of Conduct and endangered a human, and how little faith was placed in their testimony, even at their own trials.

When James had entered to deal with Sirius, Peter had left to find Remus in a silent relay, as the one who had had the least to do with the incident. Besides, Peter was good at commiserating. What he wasn't good at was mediating, and as Sirius had no tact, he could see he had an unenviable task before him: to convince one of his best friends that the other hadn't really intended to put him in a position where he could be expelled, or even arrested.

And how he was going to do that, he couldn't begin to say.

Sirius knew it was all his fault.

After all, it had been his idea; no one else's. He felt so stupid, now, looking at the ruined cottage and remembering how just a short while ago he had stood in it, with James looking ashen and about ten years older than he was, and Lily trying to quiet the baby that kept screaming as if he understood the danger he was in and that _verminous_ traitor in front of him dithering and prevaricating and playing the innocent, concerned friend:

_"But Sirius, what if I make a mess of it?"_

And how he had wheedled and cajoled and convinced like a fool:

_"Look, if they go for anyone, it'll be me. He _knows _I was going to be Secret Keeper, and he knows where I'll be. I'll play decoy and make a run for it. All you've got to do is keep your ears open. By the time they catch up with me, you'll've had plenty of time to vanish."_

Now he felt so utterly idiotic, because how could Remus be the spy? It made no sense-- not so much that one friend could betray another, because one had, obviously, but the whole thing. He'd always said that.

Purity of blood. What sort of ideology was that to base a crusade on? To begin with, you deprived yourself of some of the best people in the field-- look at Lily-- and then you limited the gene pool enormously. That was a sure fire way to kill yourself off; the Spartans tried it, and look how they ended. This whole business was barbaric, bloodthirsty and heinous, and it didn't even have the virtue of being logical; it was a petty campaign for vengeance on the part of the oldest, most incompetent and inbred families of the Wizarding world, who were being displaced by halfbloods, Muggle-borns and plebeians and couldn't face their own extinction without taking as many innocent people with them as they could. Sheer idiocy. Such was the philosophy of Remus Lupin; he liked nothing so much as things that made sense.

Then there was Peter. Old blood, no talent; hanger on and sycophant who told everyone what they wanted to hear and heard everything his betters said without contributing anything useful himself. Though he'd never thought of him that way before. Little Peter, who looked at James with such a worshipful expression that it was impossible to believe he could be a turncoat, who worked as hard as a Hufflepuff, who'd always been first to offer a sympathetic ear-- and it turned his stomach now, to think that all the complaints he'd uttered in Wormtail's presence: Alastor Moody's foibles, Dumbledore's secrecy, leads that had proven false, leads that had proven true, suspicions and intentions and implications, had all been passed on verbatim to Voldemort.

But he'd known the moment he arrived at Peter's hiding place that something was up, and then he'd been aware, in a sickening flash, that to find James and Lily he had only to go to Godric's Hollow, which could mean only one thing: they'd been betrayed. They'd told everyone beforehand. Half the Wizarding world knew where they were holed up, but the information was useless as long as the Secret Keeper kept his mouth shut. A grim contingency plan, common amongst those going into hiding; if something went wrong, at least their friends knew where to go to collect the bodies.

A moment of reeling, and then he'd been on his motorcycle, with James' laughing voice ringing in his memory, "_One of these days we'll have to scrape you off a cloud. You'll be the world's first sky kill. Why can't you just buy a broomstick like everybody else?_" and his heart going faster than the engine. Of course, it would have been faster to Apparate, but the virtue that a bike had over instantaneous travel was that you could take another person with you, or more importantly, another person carrying a baby. If he was in time, if by some miracle he got there first, he could hand the motorcycle over to James, who could fly it well enough not to hit any trees, and the Potters could escape that way and he would Apparate after them; they'd go to Dumbledore and work out something else. At least now they knew who they could trust.

When he saw the cottage in ruins with the Dark Mark lurking overhead he'd thought his heart was going to stop; there didn't seem to be any blood in his head or his hands, the one was spinning and the others were shaking. He'd had a flash of hope when he'd seen movement in the devastated building, but it was only Hagrid, whose face-- or what was visible through the great matted mass of beard and hair-- had relaxed when he'd recognised the intruder and who'd steadied him as he half fell off his bike with hands as big as the wheels.

"All righ', Sirius? You just stand yerself there while I take a look see. No point us both gettin' stuck in there."

By that time he'd been too shaken to argue, so he'd just stood there while Hagrid had ferreted around in the wreckage for the bodies of his friends. Sirius couldn't for the life of him imagine what was taking so long; you could tell whereabouts they'd be by the damage. People didn't fight Death Eaters, somehow. The sight of them seemed to immobilise their victims, and the Killing Curse didn't leave a mark.

But James and Lily had fought.

The entire front part of the cottage had collapsed-- that was James; they'd discussed defensive spells at length, with Padfoot vociferously advocating duelling spells and Prongs insisting that a bit of unexpected Transfiguration could save your neck when every curse you knew had been deflected; he must have done something to the beams in the ceiling and brought the house down around his ears, and those of his attacker.

By contrast, the back looked like a student's practical examination, half fallen in on itself and sprouting all kinds of oddities. Some detached part of his brain could name and classify every hex that had rebounded uselessly off the intended target and struck the walls. Charms were Lily's speciality; it was a good thing, they'd always said, that she was unusually phlegmatic for a redhead. One thing you never wanted to face was an angry witch who could turn you turquoise for a month. She would have retreated to fetch Harry from the nursery in the back room while James played vanguard; the back garden, visible over the wreckage, was eerily untouched. Neither of them had made it outside.

Then Hagrid lumbered back, with his face wet with tears and his arms too full of something pale and still with long red hair and limbs that hung limply down to reach for a handkerchief.

"Here, Sirius, you take the little 'un, an' I'll go back an' fetch-- an' fetch-- the other." and he'd stooped, so he was almost a normal height, and Sirius had to turn his face away, because there was only one thing Hagrid could be offering, and he thought he might vomit if he had to hold a dead baby, even if it was his godson.

But Hagrid only crouched closer, apparently thinking Sirius still couldn't reach, and the little dark haired bundle moved. Harry wasn't screaming now; he didn't much, really. He was just sitting there, shaking but docile, with the wide eyes of any child trying to process something beyond his comprehension, bright lights and loud noises and the sky falling down, or the roof at least, and he made no protest when he was transferred from his dead mother's lap to his living godfather's arms, and Lily was laid out on the grass, peaceful and still, but with staring green eyes and the dust of shattered plaster in her hair.

There was blood on the boy, dripping down his face, though Sirius couldn't make out the injury without probing him more than he was willing to risk. Hardly surprising, he'd always heard that head wounds bled copiously, and there would have been splinters flying about like maddened bludgers.

What was surprising was that Harry was alive at all, though Hagrid had seemed to know why, and he should have asked him, but the groundskeeper had gone rummaging again, and he didn't have the voice to shout.

Maybe Lily had come up with a hex that had finished her assailant off after all, but no, she was dead, and a ghost couldn't cast a spell; or maybe it hadn't been Voldemort himself who'd come, though Dumbledore had seemed to think he would, and the Death Eater hadn't had the stomach to kill a child, though they'd done it often enough before; or maybe he'd left James for dead, and Prongs had come up and attacked him from behind. That was a heartening image, Prongs up on his elbows, and a crumpled robe where the dark wizard had been, because James might still be alive in the rubble and a hero to boot, and his speculations got wilder and wilder until a second still, cold shape was laid at his feet.

Undoubtedly the worst thing about the Killing Curse-- aside from the fact that it killed, of course-- was that it left no evidence of injury. This sort of thing had puzzled Muggles for centuries. Even most of the sorts of things that finished people off without leaving holes in them had internal damage to damn them by; drowning left water in the lungs, poison could be detected in the stomach, where heart attacks and strokes were the culprits you had ruptured blood vessels. Here you had not so much a method of killing as a way of removing life. Victims of Avada Kedavra tended to look as though they had never lived; rejected prototypes for Adam that had never received the kiss of life.

So James looked all right, considering. Like his wife he was dusty, and his glasses were broken, which was hardly abnormal for James Potter, and something-- a fallen beam?-- had broken one of his arms, but there was nothing obviously fatal. Just the blank eyes behind splintered glass and no sign of respiration to indicate a less than healthy state of being.

Sirius didn't think he moved, but his reverie over the bodies was broken by Harry uttering a soft cry, and he realised his arms were shaking so badly that the baby was vibrating along with them, jarring him, and Hagrid took him back, holding the child with one hand and clamping another one down on Sirius' shoulder, and he thought he heard him mumbling, as if over a great distance: "It's all righ', Sirius, it's all righ'," which was a maddening platitude, because it quite clearly wasn't.

What he had to do, was _do_ something. A man of action; Remus and Peter had been the thinkers. Or Remus had, because Peter didn't exist anymore in his comparatives; there was just _that rat_.

But Remus-- and that gave him an idea. He'd go to Remus, because he wouldn't know yet, because they hadn't told him about the swap, and he slept a lot around this time of the month so he wouldn't have felt anything, and he'd apologise and tell him everything. Of course, Remus would think-- well, Remus would think Sirius had been Secret Keeper, but he'd listen if he had Harry-- "_Sorry, kid, orphan and hostage all in one night_"-- and he'd believe it, because it all made an alarming amount of sense, if you thought about it, and Remus liked sense.

First thing they'd hunt down and eliminate Pettigrew in the most excruciating way they could devise between them, and if Moony felt even half as homicidal over this as he did he was certain they could come up with something horrible. Then they'd go; he didn't know where, but he was doing all the plotting at this point so by then it would be Remus' turn. They'd have to get Harry away, because whether it was Voldemort who had attacked the Potters or just a Death Eater, they wouldn't be likely to leave the job half done, and besides Sirius would be a fugitive, until they thought up a way to contact Dumbledore and clear his name-- another aspect he was leaving to Remus; he couldn't do all the work.

But first thing was first, and with a prodigious effort he stilled his trembling limbs and, turning back to the groundskeeper, managed to summon a voice from the bottom of his throat. Not his voice; this voice was harsh and raspy, almost a growl, as if he could form words with his dog-throat. "Give Harry to me, Hagrid, I'm his godfather, I'll look after him."

To his surprise, Hagrid hadn't acquiesced, though he'd been nothing but helpful up until that point. "Sorry, Sirius, I got me orders from Dumbledore. Harry's ter go to his aunt an' uncle. They're ter 'ave him."

Which brought the obvious home with the whack of a Beater's bat. Of course Hagrid wouldn't be here of his own accord. Why would he have come, any more than the dozens of other people who had known Lily and James would have, to dig around in the wreckage of their house and risk being caught by lingering Death Eaters? No, he was here because Dumbledore had sent him. And Dumbledore, who was as close to omniscient as anybody Sirius had ever known, had sent him because he knew, somehow, that Harry was alive, and had to be retrieved before his 'treacherous' godfather turned up to do any more damage.

That was enough to start him shaking again, because it meant aurors might arrive at any moment, and he'd never get his chance at revenge, or to explain to Moony, or to keep his promises to James and Lily to look after their son, but there was still a chance, because Hagrid didn't think ill of him, or he'd have strangled him by now, and he knew things about the aunt and uncle Hagrid had to mean: Lily's only sister and her husband. That they were Muggles, that they were estranged from the Potters, that they were petty and pretentious people, that Lily would have hexed down to a cockroach anybody who suggested that they should raise her child.

So he argued, in that same, hoarse voice, and tried to look like somebody capable of caring for a child, instead of what he felt like, which was a murderous maniac, but Hagrid was immovable, which was hardly surprising; the man revered Dumbledore and his orders would be sacred.

In the end, he'd had to concede. 

He threw up his hands in one of those melodramatic gestures that had always made James laugh, and imitate to make him laugh, to show he'd given up, and bent down to smooth Lily's hair a bit, because she hated to be dishevelled, and took James' hand for a moment, because he didn't know how you were supposed to say goodbye to your almost-brother, and 'I'm sorry' just wasn't going to cut it, and he stood on tiptoe to tousle Harry's hair, carefully, because the boy was hurt, and told Hagrid in a voice that sounded more like his own, but oddly calm considering his state of mind, that he might as well take Harry on his motorcycle. "I won't need it anymore."

Revised plan: by now, Albus Dumbledore's owls would be battering frantically at Remus' windows, bearing the news that Sirius Black was a traitor, and in all likelihood, Remus would be gone by the time he arrived at his home. Confiding in him was out, at least for the time being.

More owls would be circling the Ministry of Magic with the same news, and his name would be added to the list of known Death Eaters that could be killed on sight. Barring a miracle, saving himself was out.

There was one thing he could still do, though, if he could stay at liberty long enough: he was going to _kill that rat_.

Peter knew it was all his fault.

Or anyway, that was how far too many people for his peace of mind were going to see it, on both sides of the fence. His fault that the Potters were dead, though that was Black's: if he hadn't insisted that Peter be Secret Keeper, he would have had nothing to report to the Dark Lord. His fault that You-Know-Who was gone, but how could he have known what was going to happen?

It was hardly as if he'd wanted to go through with any of this-- well, not entirely, anyway. On the one hand, this was the most important piece of information that had ever come into his possession for the Dark Lord's ears. To deliver the Potters to his master had been a coup to be envied by Death Eaters everywhere. You-Know-Who was a sensible superior; he punished failure in his subordinates, and punished it severely, but he rewarded success, loyalty and initiative with prizes that Dumbledore could never hope to equal without straying into dark magic.

However, on the other it had meant blowing his cover. He'd been certain that the moment the corpses were found, Black would be up and screaming murder and the hunt would begin and he would be forced to rely on those who envied his newfound prestige to hide him. There wasn't much use in a double agent that everybody was aware of, and becoming superfluous was every Death Eater's greatest fear.

But when it came down to it, once Black and Potter had been so insistent about his role in their concealment that the decision had been removed from his hands. If you knew something, you told the Dark Lord or the consequences would be dire. All he'd done was what was necessary to survive, which was what he'd done all along.

Then the unexpected had occurred: the elder Potters had died well enough, but something had spared the brat, and done for He Who Must Not Be Named in the process.

Suddenly, what had seemed a simple, pragmatic choice had become the greatest liability that Peter had ever encumbered himself with.

None of it had been his decision; few things were. They'd caught him alone one day, those sneering men in white masks-- well, of course he couldn't see their faces, but it was a fair bet that when Death Eaters cornered one of Dumbledore's chosen few they sneered-- and they'd told him he was exactly what they were looking for.

Which he'd known all along, he supposed. Disaffected crewmen were always of the same kind, and he fit the description exactly; he knew he own flaws far better than his friends knew theirs, being more given to self examination. A contradiction in terms: an introspective Gryffindor.

Pure-blooded, to begin with. The Pettigrews were at least as old as the Weasleys, and distinctly less impoverished. A pureblood, and under appreciated, always shunted to one side and overlooked, dwarfed by his towering friends. Therein lay the fatal flaw, too, that they could work on and use to twist him to their will: he was jealous.

Half his young life had been wasted in envy, from childhood onwards. At school he had envied the Slytherins the cool arrogance that allowed them to take the insults heaped on them by the other three houses with their chins held high and their supercilious smirks glued to their faces, the Ravenclaws the erudition that caused their names to pop up so often in textbooks in relation to new discoveries and inventions, the Hufflepuffs their unfailing good humour and perseverance.

More specifically, he had envied James the dazzling charm and brilliance that meant he could get away with anything; they had made him prefect despite his many transgressions and perhaps made him Head Boy because of them; in these times audacity, when coupled with intelligence, was more of an asset than otherwise. He'd envied Sirius the vivacity and spontaneity that made him everybody's favourite; by their fifth year half the girls in the school giggled when he passed them in the corridor and checked their hair, and there wasn't a teacher who hadn't predicted an illustrious career in his future-- if he ever got out of detention. And he'd envied Remus his patience and the sharp wit beneath it, even envied him his lycanthropy, because what else but his stoical attitude regarding it defined him as a Gryffindor? Which hadn't prevented him trembling with terror once a month at the prospect of risking a bite.

There were moments when he adored them and wanted nothing more than to emulate them; there were moments when he wanted to reduce them to quivering heaps, so that they could understand what it was to live in a constant state of fear, fear of others and fear of your own ineptitude.

Worst of all, they'd never seemed to notice, or at least acknowledge, his inferiority. They'd just _assumed_ he could keep up. And often enough he could, because he had to, and well and good; and when he couldn't they'd back up and go over the whole thing again, because otherwise they could end up in the sort of trouble that was no fun at all, and he'd never broached the subject with any of them, because what good would it do?

He just couldn't help suspecting, even after all these years, that they were tolerating him, humouring him, mocking him, in some way he was too dense to understand, and that one of these days they'd turn on him and laugh and tell him to get out of the way of his betters.

So he'd let the Death Eaters convince him, and he hadn't done what he ought to have-- or the next best thing to refusing to tell them anything and dying a martyr's death, anyway-- and gone to Dumbledore and confessed his weakness and let him deal with the situation. Cowardice, once begun, was a policy safest persisted in, however much he felt like kicking himself over it and he'd donned the white mask with only a few pangs of guilt.

Anyway, it hadn't been that bad. Most of the time, he'd worked as tirelessly against You-Know-Who as ever, and they hadn't made him actually _kill_ anybody, just drop a word here and there as to where such-and-such a person was hiding, or who their Secret Keeper was, or what sort of defences were being put up. And, fair being fair, if once in a while a bit of information relating to a Death Eater plot that couldn't be traced back to him came into his hands, he dutifully passed it on to his friends by way of a supposition or a hypothesis; and if the Death Eaters whom he lured into aurors' nets were always those who looked most enviously at him when the Dark Lord praised him, or those who had tormented him the most at school, well, that was just killing two birds with one stone, wasn't it?

Those little betrayals assuaged his conscience and made him feel quite lionhearted, because if ever You-Know-Who had learned about them, he would have suffered far worse torments than anything the Ministry could devise.

What was really ironic about the business was that he had received his apprenticeship in deception from those he had used it to betray. Where else had he learned to lie with a straight face, other than at Hogwarts, talking his way out of some predicament that they'd got themselves into? Him and Lupin, mostly. Not always, because the roles were interchangeable according to the situation, but if you averaged it out, most of the time Potter and Black had done the actual damage, whilst he and Lupin had worked on the diversion or the alibi.

Of course, he couldn't do it as well as Lupin, who might have been born for the part-- or at least bitten for it. After he'd got his first grey hairs at seventeen to complete the cadaverous appearance there were few teachers who didn't melt with pity in front of him, and he had a way with semantics that few could rival. But while Peter was hale and well, and even a little too portly, he had other qualities to bring to the role: he was timorous and quiet, almost dwarfishly short and easily bullied. When they stood side by side it was difficult to tell who was leaning on who, and they bounced off one another perfectly. He could do it almost as well with Potter, who could look astonishingly respectable when he put his mind to it. Maybe it was the glasses; there were all sorts of myths about people with glasses and there was a fine line between a scruffy prankster and a dishevelled intellectual. Working with Black had been much harder. His extravagances needed tempering, and Peter never knew quite what to expect from him.

All of which was moot now. 

A discrepancy in the paperwork, an odd coincidence, a missing set of orders, those things could be explained away. Dead bodies were a little harder, and it was only a matter of which side incinerated him first.

Unless-- unless-- well, there had to be a way. Perhaps he could go to Dumbledore and tell him something plausible, something that would agree with everyone else's version of events. That Black was right, they had switched, but that the spy, whoever the spy was, had discovered it, and they'd found him and dosed him with a truth serum-- or there was always the old Imperious Curse standby. But Dumbledore had an aggravating degree of perspicacity, and odds were, even if he prevented Black from killing him long enough to hear both their stories, he'd end up in a cell in Azkaban, which was only marginally preferable to a grave.

Or he could go to Lupin-- to Remus, rather, it was amazing how much you could distance yourself from people, simply by referring to them by their surnames. Potter, Black, Lupin; James, Sirius, Remus; Prongs, Padfoot, Moony; the same people, different associations. He'd go to Remus, who had no authority to restrain and question anybody, and lay all the blame on Black, who, after all, had laid a reasonable trap for himself; declared to all as the Potters' Secret Keeper. "_He's coming to _kill _me, Moony."_ Us. Kill us. Why would Sirius Black the unscrupulous double agent come after little Peter Pettigrew and leave Remus Lupin alive to act? If it came down to it, Lupin would be more likely to exact revenge than Peter would, though neither of them were the vigilante type. And Lupin, whose conscience was clear, would do all the talking before Dumbledore, and shield him from Black if it became necessary.

But there would still be an enquiry, and he'd have to talk there. A werewolf's word would only be taken so far. By then, he would have had time to compose himself, but still, with You-Know-Who dead or fled, there would be enough disoriented and disorganised Death Eaters rounded up by gloating, semi competent aurors who would be willing to denounce him to save their skins; he was hardly popular in that crowd.

Better if he could avoid all that, and just get out of the way for a while, until he could test which way the wind was blowing and come up with a better story than the implausible rubbish flitting through his head right now. Far better if he could just step out of the picture for a while.

Come to that, he could. They'd taught him that, too. The art of living a double life, because he had three names too: Pettigrew, Peter, Wormtail.

All he had to do was devise one of those alibis he'd become so adept at conjuring up. Something simple, witnessed by enough people to blur the facts; something that placed the blame squarely where it belonged: on the head of Sirius Black, who had forced him to blow his cover.

This would be a coup James and Sirius would envy forever, if either of them were going to be in a position to do so.

Remus knew it was all his fault.

His fault these children were hemmed in on all sides by fiends that fed off laughter, his fault that his fellow teachers discussed the past they were trying to forget in hushed voices over meals they didn't have the stomach for by the time they were done, his fault that James' boy was still in danger, because he didn't know how Sirius Black thought anymore and, barring the single twinge in his uneasy conscience, he didn't have the slightest idea how the man was getting into the school.

And now he was on that train of thought, there wasn't much chance of getting any real work done. He set down his quill and pushed the essay he was marking away. Anyway, Severus would be along with his potion in a moment-- which reminded him that he needed to check if the man was telling the truth about sugar neutralising the foul stuff, because he had a nasty feeling that Snape just enjoyed watching him grimace-- and then the moon would be up and he would have all evening with nothing to do but mull over what he was going to write on his students' essays as soon as he had hands again.

It rather appealed to his sense of irony, to lie curled up in his office in the shape of a wolf and consider the finer points of academia, though admittedly his first thought on the subject had been: _"If we'd only had this all those years ago!"_ which had been worth another stab of guilt, and the stern self reminder that had there been such a thing as wolfsbane when he was a boy, he'd likely have spent the full moons sleeping under a bed in the hospital wing, and not leading his friends astray in Hogsmeade.

Which brought him back to the point: he really ought to tell Dumbledore that Sirius was an Animagus. Odds were that it had nothing to do with it, but Sirius had always had a way of finding a practical use for party tricks and practical jokes; a man of infinite ingenuity. Or he had been. They'd shown him the Wanted posters, of course, featuring the gaunt felon with wild hair and dead eyes, to give him a better idea of what he faced. That might well have been a desperate Death Eater, but it wasn't Sirius Black. The Sirius he had known had had eyes so full of life that they all but leaped out of his head and danced a jig; he was clever, impulsive, irrational and loyal, a dangerous diplomatic ally, but a good man to have by you in a fight.

Which was why even after a decade of analysis, he couldn't begin to make sense of what had happened in those last, dark days when everything fell apart. How had Sirius, who had never been able to conceal a thought or emotion for more than five minutes, managed to dupe them all for over a year? There had been nothing in his behaviour to indicate a change of allegiance. Towards the end he had admittedly been a little cool towards Remus himself, but he would have sworn his affection for James was undiminished. If things had turned out differently he would have said that Padfoot was the one who held them together. With his boundless energy and dauntless enthusiasm he had jested and stormed and conjectured and propelled them all onwards against the relentless weight of the inertia that had smote them from the moment they had been informed that Voldemort considered James and Lily to be primary targets.

He had arranged everything, which, of course, had been part of the plot, but at the time had seemed so like him as to be infinitely reassuring; at the end none of the rest of them had been acting remotely like themselves.

James, who had always been so decisive, the definitive leader of their little group throughout their school years, the threat Voldemort couldn't ignore, had all but let Sirius lead him by the nose. Something had snapped in him when Dumbledore had informed him that one of their own, someone close to him and his wife, was a traitor. Disloyalty was something beyond Prongs' comprehension. Beyond Remus', too, except in the cynical sense he had acquired later. At heart he had trusted, and continued to trust, even after he had been warned to watch those in whom he placed his faith, and it had been the death of him.

Lily, whom nothing could shake, had been so pale that she was all green eyes and red hair against the white wall paper with nothing between, and he'd seen her eyes on Sirius and Peter and felt them on himself, and known she was wondering, in lieu of her husband, if one of them, perhaps… But she must have found no conclusions in her musings, because she had made no accusations, just trundled doggedly on in the face of adversity as if in a trance.

As for Peter-- that was a surprise that had an air of the tragicomic. Vendettas weren't his style at all. When things got dark and difficult, Wormtail went for help. Such was his code and creed. Any number of his post full moon waking memories, if he was too slow to stir or had any obvious injuries, were marked by the gentle, tremulous voice of Peter Pettigrew enquiring: _"Should I get somebody, Moony?"_ Grief did strange things to people. Distress had quashed common sense in Peter, and in a painfully ironic twist he had acted exactly as Remus would have thought Sirius would; hunted the culprit down and died attempting to apprehend him. It still hurt a little that Peter hadn't invited him along.

And himself? Well, he'd hardly been helpful, had he? Wasn't he supposed to be the logical one? Silver haired, shabby, pallid and old before his time; patient Remus Lupin who saw patterns where nobody else could, dealt in subtleties, was too smart to hold grudges, too sensible to be an extremist and who uttered not a word of complaint when he had to line up for three hours behind two Hippogriffs and a Griffin at the Ministry of Magic to get directions to the new location of the Werewolf Registry to update his details. 

It was his job to sit back and rationalise things, to sort out the common factors and find the answer; in short, he should have been able to figure out who the traitor was. But he hadn't, he'd been as paralysed as the rest of them.

They hadn't had many friends; it was impossible to be gregarious in that climate, when the man buying you butterbeer in the pub could be luring you into a trap, when you had to be careful that nothing you said was leaked to the Death Eaters. Two or three girls Lily had stayed in touch with since she graduated, who didn't work in the same field and had no access to the technical information, a couple of acquaintances from work with whom they rarely socialised, and themselves; he could discount himself and James, naturally, and how to choose between the two who remained? How to discern what was a sign of treason and what a mere symptom of nerves? Were Peter's bouts of withdrawal or Sirius' spontaneous outbursts of temper evidence of a guilty conscience? They'd exhibited much the same behaviour back when they were taking their N.E.W.Ts, and what had that signified? Nothing but anxiety and overwork and distemper.

But he couldn't let it be, not until he fingered the vital point. Somewhere in his memory there was a moment that jarred, that he should have spotted and had missed, and when he finally found it he could sit up and say: "Ah. That's when I should have known Sirius was a Death Eater." Then, maybe, he could make his peace with the dead.

This was getting him nowhere; and still no Severus. He'd locked the door as a precaution, but if the Potions Master neglected his promise and he ended up ransacking his own office in wolf shape he might just forget that he wasn't sixteen anymore and find a few words to say to Professor Snape of the less than courteous kind.

Time to take another jab at that essay. The trouble with marking Oliver Wood's work was that you had to come by all his answers by way of complicated Quidditch metaphors. While he had never quite thought of being attacked by a herd of Graphorns as being comparable to 'being pursued by a couple of rogue bludgers with both your Beaters down injured,' he supposed the boy had a point, but he was going to have to look up some of these manoeuvres in the library to see if Wood's reworking of them as defensive formations against wild beasts was at all feasible. Which was another excuse to delay marking it.

Instead he fished out the old Marauders Map; there was something he wanted to check on there, anyway. They'd be out and about on the grounds this evening, he was sure: Harry Potter and Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. He knew they would be, because he would have been, he and James and Sirius and Peter, and he could see them in these children; primarily in Harry of course, who looked so eerily like James that it was difficult to refuse him anything. They were executing that poor Hippogriff now, and if it had happened in their time he wouldn't have been surprised if they'd let it loose in the Forbidden Forest and conjured up some sort of effigy to replace it.

"I solemnly swear I am up to no good," and even now he couldn't say that without a bit of a smirk, and felt a flush of pride as the map bloomed into being on the parchment before him. Sure enough, three little dots were scurrying across the school grounds, huddled close together, doubtless hiding beneath the Invisibility Cloak that several generations of Potters and their comrades had used to wreak havoc on unsuspecting teachers and enemy students.

Probably, he should go and haul them back, but he wasn't going to risk leaving his office now, without the precaution of wolfsbane and the with moon so close to rising, and anyway it was a harmless enough escapade; the school was well guarded, and Hagrid would keep an eye on them. He saw them safely to the groundskeeper's hut, then turned his eyes to scrutinise the edges of the map, lest a certain black dog should be lurking there, unnoticed.

What troubled him most was his own sense of shame; all this time he hadn't told Dumbledore what he knew, because that would be admitting a betrayal almost as grave as Sirius'. Back when it mattered most he hadn't been able to pick the traitor, because he had his own demons to contend with.

He'd been enjoying himself entirely too much. Not the peril, not the grief, certainly not the look of inconsolable horror on James' face when they'd told him he had to go into hiding or the nightmarish business that had been collecting the bodies, and being told that the child was gone to strange relatives, the traitor to prison and madness and Peter to too many fragments to be collected, but the _importance_ of the work. Those dark, dangerous years had been the last time he'd had the chance to do the sort of work for which he had been trained. It had been an extension of the sanctuary of schooldays, collaborating with friends who knew his mind and methods as well as their own, exercising every mental muscle, using every spell at his disposal, and having no awkward questions asked when he departed early in the afternoon on the nights of the full moon, followed half an hour later by three colleagues who'd sprouted fur coats. Subsistence living was an art in and of itself, but hardly a satisfying one, and he'd long since grown tired of observing wryly to prospective employers that werewolves might not be such disreputable people if they were allowed to hold a job long enough to be able to afford some decent robes.

There were few things more terrible than to feel nostalgic about the bad old days of the war, but he did, and he might even have welcomed Sirius' re-emergence, if Peter had been alive to sort it through with.

Then he looked back at the centre of the map again and found the moving group that was his students, and for a moment wondered if they'd inadvertently made that map a genie when they'd written it, because a fourth dot was visible, pressed close to Ron's side. A dot labelled Peter Pettigrew.

And then another dot streaked across the field from one of those corners he had so carefully perused a moment ago, a dot that bore the name of another old friend, and it overlapped the dots that were Ron and Peter and bore them away towards the old Whomping Willow, and several of the desperately sought clues about the past that had eluded him for so long fell into place in his head, too rapidly to be properly collated.

Without sparing a second to confirm in his own head the suspicions roused by what he had just seen-- a very focused Sirius, a living Peter, a child and his pet rat and Harry, thankfully, left quite unharmed-- Remus was on his feet, and had the door open, quite forgetting the reason he had locked it in the first place, and was running as fast as he could to where he thought he would find the answers to his questions.

A rat and a dog were waiting for him, and one of them-- and he thought he knew which, finally-- had a lot to answer for.


End file.
